Holocaust survivor tells students to stand up for what's right

By Zeke MacCormack :
April 26, 2013
: Updated: April 26, 2013 11:18pm

Navarro Intermediate School fifth-grader Cassie Wertheim hugs Inge Auerbacher after giving her a letter containing a 1943 penny, symbolizing the year Auerbacher was incarcerated in a Nazi concnetation camp. Looking on is student Cameron Royal.

NAVARRO — A firsthand account of Nazi cruelties perpetrated against WWII concentration camp prisoners left Navarro Intermediate School students and faculty somber Friday, some in tears.

Inge Auerbacher recalled whippings while being marched to prison at age 7, starvation and disease inside, and seeing the corpses of those who died before the camp's liberation by Russian soldiers on May 8, 1945.

“Lunch was soup with some garbage floating in it,” said Auerbacher, 78, narrating a slide show about her tragic turn from happy-go-lucky kid in Germany to an inmate for three years in Terezin, Czechoslovakia. “Rats, mice, fleas and bedbugs, those were our companions.”

Despite the grim subject matter, the author and lecturer from Queens, N.Y. often injected humor into her talks to roughly 140 fifth-graders at the school in rural Guadalupe County.

She called her balding father Berthold “Mr. Clean” and joked, “Dad had 10 hairs per square foot.” While he and his wife, Regina, survived, 13 of their close kin were executed.

It was the ninth year Auerbacher has visited the school at the invitation of teacher Lisa Barry for lessons on the Holocaust, bullying and intolerance.

“Listening to kids call each other names and cry over bullying, I just felt that I needed to find something that they could connect their hearts to, to create empathy,” Barry said. “I thought they would relate to children of the Holocaust, and Inge was one of them.”

To better understand the magnitude of the genocide, students in 2007 began assembling pennies with the goal of collecting one for each of the six million Jews killed.

“We're knocking on the second million,” said Barry, who calls it a mixed blessing that the cash — periodically deposited to a bank account that benefits charitable groups — wasn't tallied years ago. “The longer it takes, the more students will have participated.”

The kids were clearly impressed by Auerbacher's fast-paced talk on the evils of prejudice, the cruelty of man and her contempt for those unwilling to stand up for what's right.

She still has the yellow “Jude” star she was forced by Nazis to wear, copies of the transport order they issued her family to “resettle” and a replica of her favorite doll that helped her endure the camp's many horrors.

Micayla Hawes, 11, said, “The cruelty was terrible. I could never imagine that.”

While Auerbacher's faith in God is intact, her confidence in humanity was clearly tested by the lack of protest from long-ago friends and neighbors as her family was shipped off.

“You're equally guilty of a crime if you just look. You're part of it then,” she told the kids. “If you see someone bullied, you should stand up.”

But Auerbacher also spoke of kindnesses shown by strangers, most notably a woman who secretly slipped her food as other train passengers taunted Auerbacher for being Jewish.

“What she did was monumental,” she said of the stranger. “She was my hero.”

As Auerbacher posed for photos and signed copies of her book, “I Am A Star” — which the class had read as an assignment — student Kelly Helms, 11, shared this thought: “You can't learn from the past if you forget it.”

Asked what she'd learned, classmate Annie Patlan, 11, said, “You may start out thinking prejudice is a small thing and, before you know it, it's uncontrollable.”

Reading specialist Kelly Bingham was left teary-eyed by Auerbacher, who told her, “Don't cry. Be positive.”

Auerbacher, author of six books, also will give free public addresses at 2 p.m. Sunday at the New Braunfels Public Library, at 6:30 p.m. Monday at LaVernia Junior High and at 6 p.m. Thursday at the Seguin Public Library.